How we use Hipchat to work remotely

Server Density started as a remote working company, and it wasn’t until our 3rd year that we opened an office in London. Even now, most of the team still work remotely from around the UK, Portugal and Spain so we use a variety of tools to help us stay connected and work efficiently together.

One of the most important is Hipchat. We use this as a chat room but it’s also our company news feed. Everything that goes on during the day (and night) gets posted and we use a variety of rooms for different purposes.

The main room

Everyone is always logged in here during their working day and it also acts as a real time news feed of what is going on. General chat happens here but it’s mostly a way for everyone to see what’s happening. This is particularly useful if you go away and come back later because you can see what has happened.

We use various integrations and the Hipchat API to post in events from things like:

Github activity: commits, pull requests, comments.

Buildbot: Build activity.

Deploys: From our own custom build system, we can see when deploys are triggered (and by whom) and then when they get deployed to each server.

Signups: New trial signups get posted in as we often like to see who is using the product.

Account changes: New purchases and package changes

JIRA: All our issue tracking and development work is tracked with JIRA, which posts some activity like new issues and status changes.

Zendesk: New support tickets and Twitter mentions so everyone can keep an eye on emerging issues.

Ops war room

All incidents from our alerting systems get piped into a war room so we can see what’s going on in real time, chronological order and not be distracted by other events. The key here is maintaining a sterile cockpit rule so we use this room to only discuss ongoing incidents. This also is useful for other people (e.g. support) to track what’s happening without interrupting the responders.

Bot

We have a bot that runs in all of our chat rooms. It’s fairly simple and based off Hubot but allows us to do things like query Google Images or check the status of Github.